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  The Aesthetics of Kinship: Form and Family in the Long Eighteenth Century

  Heidi Schlipphacke

  The Aesthetics of Kinship intervenes critically into rigidified discourses about the emergence of the nuclear family and the corresponding interior subject in the eighteenth century. By focusing on kinship constellations instead of “family plots” in seminal literary works of the period, this book presents an alternative view of the eighteenth-century literary social world and its concomitant ideologies. Whereas Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophy and political theory posit the nuclear family as a microcosm for the ideal modern nation-state, literature of the period offers a far more heterogeneous image of kinship structures, one that includes members of various classes and is not defined by blood. Through a radical re-reading of the multifarious kinship structures represented in literature of the long eighteenth century, The Aesthetics of Kinship questions the inevitability of the dialectic of the Enlightenment and invokes alternative futures for conceptions of social and political life.

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  Alimentary Orientalism: Britain’s Literary Imagination and the Edible East

  Yin Yuan

  What, exactly, did tea, sugar, and opium mean in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain? Alimentary Orientalism reassesses the politics of Orientalist representation by examining the contentious debates surrounding these exotic, recently popularized, and literally consumable things. It suggests that the interwoven discourses sparked by these commodities transformed the period’s literary Orientalism and created surprisingly self-reflexive ways through which British writers encountered and imagined cultural otherness. Tracing exotic ingestion as a motif across a range of authors and genres, this book considers how, why, and whither writers used scenes of eating, drinking, and smoking to diagnose and interrogate their own solipsistic constructions of the Orient. As national and cultural boundaries became increasingly porous, such self-reflexive inquiries into the nature and role of otherness provided an unexpected avenue for British imperial subjectivity to emerge and coalesce.

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  Women and Music in the Age of Austen

  Linda Zionkowski and Miriam F. Hart

  Women and Music in the Age of Austen highlights the central role women played in musical performance, composition, reception, and representation, and analyzes its formative and lasting effect on Georgian culture. This interdisciplinary collection of essays from musicology, literary studies, and gender studies challenges the conventional historical categories that marginalize women’s experience from Austen’s time. Contesting the distinctions between professional and amateur musicians, public and domestic sites of musical production, and performers and composers of music, the contributors reveal how women’s widespread involvement in the Georgian musical scene allowed for self-expression, artistic influence, and access to communities that transcended the boundaries of gender, class, and nationality. This volume’s breadth of focus advances our understanding of a period that witnessed a musical flourishing, much of it animated by female hands and voices.

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  Families of the Heart: Surrogate Relations in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

  Ann Campbell

  In this innovative analysis of canonical British novels, Campbell identifies a new literary device—the surrogate family—as a signal of cultural anxieties about young women’s changing relationship to matrimony across the long eighteenth century. By assembling chosen families rather than families of origin, Campbell convincingly argues, female protagonists in these works compensate for weak family ties, explore the world and themselves, prepare for idealized marriages, or sidestep marriage altogether. Tracing the evolution of this rich convention from the female characters in Defoe’s and Richardson’s fiction who are allowed some autonomy in choosing spouses, to the more explicitly feminist work of Haywood and Burney, in which connections between protagonists and their surrogate sisters and mothers can substitute for marriage itself, this book makes an ambitious intervention by upending a traditional trope—the model of the hierarchal family—ultimately offering a new lens through which to regard these familiar works.

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  Eighteenth-Century Environmental Humanities

  Jeremy Chow

  This groundbreaking new volume unites eighteenth-century studies and the environmental humanities, showcasing how these fields can vibrantly benefit one another. In eleven chapters that engage a variety of eighteenth-century texts, contributors explore timely themes and topics such as climate change, new materialisms, the blue humanities, indigeneity and decoloniality, and green utopianism. Additionally, each chapter reflects on pedagogical concerns, asking: How do we teach eighteenth-century environmental humanities? With particular attention to the voices of early-career scholars who bring cutting-edge perspectives, these essays highlight vital and innovative trends that can enrich both disciplines, making them essential for classroom use.

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  1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era (Volume 27)

  Kevin L. Cope, Samara Anne Cahill, and Chris Barrett

  Rigorously inventive and revelatory in its adventurousness, 1650–1850 opens a forum for the discussion, investigation, and analysis of the full range of long-eighteenth-century writing, thinking, and artistry. Combining fresh considerations of prominent authors and artists with searches for overlooked or offbeat elements of the Enlightenment legacy, 1650–1850 delivers a comprehensive but richly detailed rendering of the first days, the first principles, and the first efforts of modern culture. Its pages open to the works of all nations and language traditions, providing a truly global picture of a period that routinely shattered boundaries. Volume 27 of this long-running journal is no exception to this tradition of focused inclusivity. Readers will travel through a blockbuster special feature on the topic of worldmaking and other worlds—on the Enlightenment zest for the discovery, charting, imagining, and evaluating of new worlds, envisioned worlds, utopian worlds, and worlds of the future. Essays in this enthusiastically extraterritorial offering escort readers through the science-fictional worlds of Lady Cavendish, around European gardens, over the high seas, across the American frontiers, into forests and exotic ecosystems, and, in sum, into the unlimited expanses of the Enlightenment mind. Further enlivening the volume is a cavalcade of full-length book reviews evaluating the latest in eighteenth-century scholarship.

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  Velocipedomania: A Cultural History of the Velocipede in France

  Corry Cropper and Seth Whidden

  When blacksmith Pierre Michaux affixed pedals to the front axle of a two-wheeled scooter with a seat, he helped kick off a craze known as velocipedomania, which swept France in the late 1860s. The immediate forerunner of the bicycle, the velocipede similarly reflected changing cultural attitudes and challenged gender norms.
  
  Velocipedomania is the first in-depth study of the velocipede fad and the popular culture it inspired. It explores how the device was hailed as a symbol of France’s cutting-edge technological advancements, yet also marketed as an invention with a noble pedigree, born from the nation’s cultural and literary heritage. Giving readers a window into the material culture and enthusiasms of Second Empire France, it provides the first English translations of 1869’s Manual of the Velocipede, 1868’s Note on Monsieur Michaux’s Velocipede, and the 1869 operetta Dagobert and his Velocipede. It also reprints scores of rare images from newspapers and advertisements, analyzing how these magnificent machines captured the era’s visual imagination. By looking at how it influenced French attitudes towards politics, national identity, technology, fashion, fitness, and gender roles, this book shows how the short-lived craze of velocipedomania had a big impact.

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  Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe with his Vision of the Angelick World: The Stoke Newington Edition

  Daniel Defoe, Maximillian E. Novak, and Irving N. Rothman

  Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe with his Vision of the Angelick World, first published in 1720 and considered a sequel to The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, is a collection of essays written in the voice of the Crusoe character. Expressing Defoe’s thoughts about many moral questions of the day, the narrator takes up isolation, poverty, religious liberty, and epistemology. Defoe also used this volume to revive his interest in poetry, not the satiric poetry of the early eighteenth century, but the more inspirational verse that appeared in some of his later works. Serious Reflections also includes an imaginative flight in which Crusoe wanders among the planets, a return to the moon voyage impulse of Defoe’s 1705 work The Consolidator. Illuminating the ideas and philosophy of this most influential of English novelists, it is invaluable for any student of the period.

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  Dante in Deutschland: An Itinerary of Romantic Myth

  Daniel DiMassa

  Around the turn of the nineteenth century, no task seemed more urgent to German Romantics than the creation of a new mythology. It would unite modern poets and grant them common ground, and bring philosophers and the Volk closer together. But what would a new mythology look like? Only one model sufficed, according to Friedrich Schlegel: Dante’s Divine Comedy. Through reading and juxtaposing canonical and obscure texts, Dante in Deutschland shows how Dante’s work shaped the development of German Romanticism; it argues, all the while, that the weight of Dante’s influence induced a Romantic preoccupation with authority: Who was authorized to create a mythology? This question—traced across texts by Schelling, Novalis, and Goethe—begets a Neo-Romantic fixation with Dantean authority in the mythic ventures of Gerhart Hauptmann, Rudolf Borchardt, and Stefan George. Only in Thomas Mann’s novels, DiMassa asserts, is the Romantics’ Dantean project ultimately demythologized.

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  The Limits of Familiarity: Authorship and Romantic Readers

  Lindsey Eckert

  What did Wordsworth wear, and where did he walk? Who was Byron’s new mistress, and how did his marriage fare? Answers—sometimes accurate, sometimes not—were tantalizingly at the ready in the Romantic era, when confessional poetry, romans à clef, personal essays, and gossip columns offered readers exceptional access to well-known authors. But at what point did familiarity become overfamiliarity? Widely recognized as a social virtue, familiarity—a feeling of emotional closeness or comforting predictability—could also be dangerous, vulgar, or boring. In The Limits of Familiarity, Eckert persuasively argues that such concerns shaped literary production in the Romantic period. Bringing together reception studies, celebrity studies, and literary history to reveal how anxieties about familiarity shaped both Romanticism and conceptions of authorship, this book encourages us to reflect in our own fraught historical moment on the distinction between telling all and telling all too much.

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  Planet Work: Rethinking Labor and Leisure in the Anthropocene

  Ryan Hediger, Ryan Hediger, and David Rodland

  Labor and labor norms orient much of contemporary life, organizing our days and years and driving planetary environmental change. Yet, labor, as a foundational set of values and practices, has not been sufficiently interrogated in the context of the environmental humanities for its profound role in climate change and other crises. This collection of essays demonstrates the urgent need to rethink models and customs of labor and leisure in the Anthropocene. Recognizing the grave traumas and hazards plaguing planet Earth, contributors expose fundamental flaws in ideas of work and search for ways to redirect cultures toward more sustainable modes of life. These essays evaluate Anthropocene frames of interpretation, dramatize problems and potentials in regimes of labor, and explore leisure practices such as walking and storytelling as modes of recasting life, while a coda advocates reviving notions of work as craft.

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  Dystopias of Infamy: Insult and Collective Identity in Early Modern Spain

  Javier Irigoyen-García

  Insults, scorn, and verbal abuse—frequently deployed to affirm the social identity of the insulter—are destined to fail when that language is appropriated and embraced by the maligned group. In such circumstances, slander may instead empower and reinforce the collective identity of those perceived to be a threat to an idealized society. In this innovative study, Irigoyen-Garcia examines how the discourse and practices of insult and infamy shaped the cultural imagination, anxieties, and fantasies of early modern Spain. Drawing on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literary works, archival research, religious and political literature, and iconographic documents, Dystopias of Infamy traces how the production of insults haunts the imaginary of power, provoking latent anxieties about individual and collective resistance to subjectification. Of particular note is Cervantes’s tendency to parody regulatory fantasies about infamy throughout his work, lampooning repressive law for its paradoxical potential to instigate the very defiance it fears.

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  A Clubbable Man: Essays on Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture in Honor of Greg Clingham

  Anthony W. Lee, Anthony W. Lee, and Philip Smallwood

  Samuel Johnson famously referred to his future biographer, the unsociable magistrate Sir John Hawkins, as “a most unclubbable man." Conversely, this celebratory volume gathers distinguished eighteenth-century studies scholars to honor the achievements, professional generosity, and sociability of Greg Clingham, taking as its theme textual and social group formations. Here, Philip Smallwood examines the “mirrored minds” of Johnson and Shakespeare, while David Hopkins parses intersections of the general and particular in three key eighteenth-century figures. Aaron Hanlon draws parallels between instances of physical rambling and rhetorical strategies in Johnson’s Rambler, while Cedric D. Reverand dissects the intertextual strands uniting Dryden and Pope. Contributors take up other topics significant to the field, including post-feminism, travel, and seismology. Whether discussing cultural exchange or textual reciprocities, each piece extends the theme, building on the trope of relationship to organize and express its findings. Rounding out this collection are tributes from Clingham’s former students and colleagues, including original poetry.

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  Reading Homer's Iliad

  Kostas Myrsiades

  We still read Homer’s epic the Iliad two-and-one-half millennia since its emergence for the questions it poses and the answers it provides for our age, as viable today as they were in Homer’s own times. What is worth dying for? What is the meaning of honor and fame? What are the consequences of intense emotion and violence? What does recognition of one’s mortality teach? We also turn to Homer’s Iliad in the twenty-first century for the poet’s preoccupation with the essence of human life. His emphasis on human understanding of mortality, his celebration of the human mind, and his focus on human striving after consciousness and identity has led audiences to this epic generation after generation. This study is a book-by-book commentary on the epic’s 24 parts, meant to inform students new to the work. Endnotes clarify and elaborate on myths that Homer leaves unfinished, explain terms and phrases, and provide background information. The volume concludes with a general bibliography of work on the Iliad, in addition to bibliographies accompanying each book’s commentary.

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  The Aesthetic Border: Colombian Literature in the Face of Globalization

  Brantley Nicholson

  This groundbreaking study examines how modern Colombian literature—from Gabriel García Márquez to Juan Gabriel Vásquez—reflects one of the world’s most tumultuous entrances into globalization. While these literary icons, one canonical, the other emergent, bookend Colombia’s fall and rise on the world stage, the period between the two was inordinately violent, spanning the Colombian urban novel’s evolution into narco-literature. Marking Colombia’s cultural and literary manifestations as threefold, this book explores García Márquez’s retreat to a rural romanticism that paradoxically made him a global literary icon; the country’s violent end to the twentieth century when its largest economic export was narcotics; and the contemporary period in which a new major author has emerged to create a “literature of national reconstitution.” Harkening back to the Regeneration movement and extending through the early twenty-first century, this book analyzes the cultural implications of Colombia’s relationship to the wider world.

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  Screen Time: Photography and Video Art in the Internet Age

  Richard Rinehart and Phillip Prodger

  Published on the occasion of the art exhibition Screen Time: Photography and Video Art in the Internet Age, this catalog features a selection of leading international artists who engage with and critique the role of media in contemporary society. Their work demonstrates what has become known as post-internet artistic practices—art that may or may not be made for the internet but nevertheless acknowledges online culture as an omnipresent influence, inseparable from contemporary social conditions. They ask what it means to be a photographer when everyone is an Instagram influencer; what it means to make video art when everyone is a TikTok video star; and how to deliver meaningful social commentary in the age of the meme. The exhibition and accompanying catalog showcase artwork by N. Dash, Nathalie Djurberg, Marcel Dzama, Peter Funch, Cyrus Kabiru, William Kentridge, Christian Marclay, Marilyn Minter, Vik Muniz, Otobong Nkanga, Erwin Olaf, Robin Rhode, Vee Speers, Mary Sue, Puck Verkade, Huang Yan.
  
  Published by Bucknell University Press for the Samek Art Museum.
  Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
  

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  Shipwreck in the Early Modern Hispanic World

  Carrie L. Ruiz, Elena Rodríguez-Guridi, and Josiah Blackmore

  Seafaring activity for trade and travel was dominant throughout the Spanish Empire, and in the worldview and imagination of its inhabitants, the specter of shipwreck loomed large. Shipwreck in the Early Modern Hispanic World probes this preoccupation by examining portrayals of nautical disasters in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish literature and culture. The essays collected here showcase shipwreck’s symbolic deployment to question colonial expansion and transoceanic trade; to critique the Christian enterprise overseas; to signal the collapse of dominant social order; and to relay moral messages and represent socio-political debates. The contributors find examples in poetry, theater, narrative fiction, and other print artifacts, and approach the topic variously through the lens of historical, literary, and cultural studies. Ultimately demonstrating how shipwrecks both shaped and destabilized perceptions of the Spanish Empire worldwide, this analytically rich volume is the first in Hispanic studies to investigate the darker side of mercantile and imperial expansion through maritime disaster.

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  Deep Mapping the Literary Lake District: A Geographical Text Analysis

  Joanna E. Taylor and Ian N. Gregory

  England’s famed Lake District—best known as the place of inspiration for the Wordsworths, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and other Romantic-era writers—is the locus of this pioneering study, which implements and critiques a new approach to literary analysis in the digital age. Deploying innovative methods from literary studies, corpus linguistics, historical geography, and geographical information science, Deep Mapping the Literary Lake District combines close readings of a body of writing about the region from 1622-1900 with distant approaches to textual analysis. This path-breaking volume exemplifies interdisciplinarity, demonstrating how digital humanities methodologies and geospatial tools can enhance our appreciation of a region whose topography has been long recognized as fundamental to the shape of the poetry and prose produced within it.

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  Founders of the Future: The Science and Industry of Spanish Modernization

  Óscar Iván Useche

  In this ambitious new interdisciplinary study, Useche proposes the metaphor of the social foundry to parse how industrialization informed and shaped cultural and national discourses in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain. Across a variety of texts, Spanish writers, scientists, educators, and politicians appropriated the new economies of industrial production—particularly its emphasis on the human capacity to transform reality through energy and work—to produce new conceptual frameworks that changed their vision of the future. These influences soon appeared in plans to enhance the nation’s productivity, justify systems of class stratification and labor exploitation, or suggest state organizational improvements. This fresh look at canonical writers such as Emilia Pardo Bazán, Concha Espina, Benito Pérez Galdós, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, and José Echegaray as well as lesser known authors offers close readings of their work as it reflected the complexity of Spain’s process of modernization.
  

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  Political Affairs of the Heart: Female Travel Writers, the Sentimental Travelogue, and Revolution, 1775-1800

  Linda Van Netten Blimke

  Richly researched and engagingly written, Political Affairs of the Heart traces the emergence of female sentimental travel writing in late eighteenth-century Britain, and posits its centrality to women’s engagement with national and gender politics. This study examines four travel narratives written by women between 1774 and 1795, convincingly arguing that they effectively deploy the discourse of sensibility to engage with debates around Britain’s national identity during the French and American Revolutions. Van Netten Blimke contends that Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768)—which first introduced sentimental discourse to the travelogue—facilitated women’s gradual inclusion into this previously male-dominated genre, effectively paving the way for women to influence the country’s sociopolitical transformation. These four previously understudied works successfully combine eyewitness authority with the language of sensibility to mount impassioned interventions in their nation’s perception and practice of revolutionary politics, at a time when its national identity was most in flux.

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  The Quotable Voltaire

  Garry Apgar, Edward M. Langille, and François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire) (1694-1778)

  The author of more than 2,000 books and pamphlets, Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694-1778) was one of the most prolific writers of the eighteenth century, and also one of the wittiest and most insightful. This unique collection of over 800 of Voltaire’s wisest passages and choicest bons mots runs the gamut on topics from adultery to Zoroaster, in both English and French.
  
  Drawing from a wide range of his publications, private letters, and remarks recorded by his contemporaries, The Quotable Voltaire includes material never before gathered in a single volume. English translations appear alongside the original French, and each quote is thoroughly indexed and referenced, with page numbers for both the first known publication edition of each entry and the most recent edition of Voltaire’s works. The book also features over 400 quotes about Voltaire, including commentary by eighteenth-century luminaries like Samuel Johnson, Catherine the Great, Casanova, and John Adams, as well as an eclectic assortment of modern-day personages ranging from Winston Churchill and Jorge Luis Borges to Mae West and Mike Tyson.
  
  Lavishly illustrated with nearly three dozen images of Voltaire-related art, this collection opens with a scholarly essay that recounts the great man’s life and reflects on his outsized influence on Western culture. Whether you are a Voltaire scholar or a neophyte, The Quotable Voltaire is the perfect introduction to a brilliant mind.

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  Two Women: A Novel

  Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Barbara F. Ichiishi, and Brígida M. Pastor

  In 1842, a young Cuban woman living in Spain published a novel that was so passionate and boldly feminist in content, it did not appear in her homeland until more than seventy years later. Two Women tells the riveting tale of a tumultuous love triangle among three wealthy Spaniards: a brilliant, young, widowed countess named Catalina, her inexperienced lover Carlos, and his pure and virtuous wife Luisa. The two women start out as rivals, yet in an insightful twist, they ultimately find they are both victims of a patriarchal society that ruthlessly pits women against each other. As the story builds to its thrilling climax, they confront the stark truth that in nineteenth-century Spain, women have few paths to a happy ending.
  
  This first English translation of the novel captures the lyrical romanticism of its prose and includes a scholarly introduction to the work and its author, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, a pioneering feminist and anti-slavery activist who based the character of Catalina on her own experience. Two Women is a searing indictment of the stern laws and customs governing marriage in the Hispanic world, brought to life in a spellbinding, tragic love story.

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  Calila: The Later Novels of Carmen Martín Gaite

  Joan L. Brown

  Calila: The Later Novels of Carmen Martín Gaite explores the last six novels by Spain´s most honored contemporary woman writer. Its scholarship is enriched by the voice of Calila herself—as Brown called Martín Gaite, who was a dear friend—as they conversed and exchanged letters during the composition of the novels. The book opens with an introduction to Martín Gaite´s life and literature and ends with a consideration of her legacy. Each central chapter analyzes a later novel in its historical, biographical, and critical contexts. From the young adult fantasy Caperucita en Manhattan (Red Riding Hood in Manhattan) to the post-Transition epistolary masterpiece Nubosidad variable (Variable Cloud), the Transition-era saga La Reina de las Nieves (The Farewell Angel), the Proustian reminiscence Lo raro es vivir (Living’s the Strange Thing), the narrative tapestry Irse de casa (Leaving Home), and the memoir of family secrets Los parentescos (Family Relations), these fascinating novels evoke themes that resonate today.

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  Hemispheres and Stratospheres: The Idea and Experience of Distance in the International Enlightenment

  Kevin L. Cope

  Recognizing distance as a central concern of the Enlightenment, this volume offers eight essays on distance in art and literature; on cultural transmission and exchange over distance; and on distance as a topic in science, a theme in literature, and a central issue in modern research methods. Through studies of landscape gardens, architecture, imaginary voyages, transcontinental philosophical exchange, and cosmological poetry, Hemispheres and Stratospheres unfurls the early history of a distance culture that influences our own era of global information exchange, long-haul flights, colossal skyscrapers, and space tourism.

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  1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era (Volume 26)

  Kevin L. Cope, Samara Anne Cahill, and Norbert Col

  Volume 26 of 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era travels beyond the usual discussions of power, identity, and cultural production to visit the purlieus and provinces of Britain’s literary empire. Bulging at its bindings are essays investigating out-of-the-way but influential ensembles, whether female religious enthusiasts, annotators of Maria Edgeworth’s underappreciated works, or modern video-based Islamic super-heroines energized by Mary Wollstonecraft’s irreverance. The global impact of the local is celebrated in studies of the personal pronoun in Samuel Johnson’s political writings and of the outsize role of a difficult old codger in catalyzing the literary career of Charlotte Smith. Headlining a volume that peers into minute details in order to see the outer limits of Enlightenment culture is a special feature on metaphor in long-eighteenth-century poetry and criticism. Five interdisciplinary essays investigate the deep Enlightenment origins of a trope usually associated with the rise of Romanticism. Volume 26 culminates in a rich review section containing fourteen responses to current books on Enlightenment religion, science, literature, philosophy, political science, music, history, and art.

  About the annual journal 1650-1850
  1650-1850 publishes essays and reviews from and about a wide range of academic disciplines: literature (both in English and other languages), philosophy, art history, history, religion, and science. Interdisciplinary in scope and approach, 1650-1850 emphasizes aesthetic manifestations and applications of ideas, and encourages studies that move between the arts and the sciences—between the “hard” and the “humane” disciplines. The editors encourage proposals for special features that bring together five to seven essays on focused themes within its historical range, from the Interregnum to the end of the first generation of Romantic writers. While also being open to more specialized or particular studies that match up with the general themes and goals of the journal, 1650-1850 is in the first instance a journal about the artful presentation of ideas that welcomes good writing from its contributors.
  
  ISSN 1065-3112.
  
  Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.